kopal - Co-operative Development of a Long-Term Digital Information Archive
Making digital documents available long-term is one of the still unsolved problems of our information society. With the increasing number of electronic publications, it is becoming critical that we reliably archive them. In the course of technological development, new digital file formats which are dependent on specific hardware and operating systems are continually being developed and used. Thus, older data are often not usable with current hardware and software. The kopal project is dedicated to finding a solution to this problem in the form of a cooperatively developed and operated long-term archive for digital data.
The kopal demonstrator visualizes concept and workflow of the kopal archival system.
The German National Library, the Niedersaechsische Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Goettingen (Goettingen State and University Library), the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Deutschland GmbH are working in close cooperation on a technological solution for long-term archiving that has as its goal not only the archiving of digital documents, but more importantly, the preservation of digital documents so that they will be accessible in the future even if technologies change.